Citizen scientists can crowdsource New Horizons' next destination

Citizen scientists can help find the next flyby target for Nasa's New Horizons
spacecraft, with Zooniverse's new Ice Hunters
project.

The unmanned probe is currently en-route to the Pluto
system, and in July 2015 it will fly by and study the dwarf planet
and its moons. Once its done, it will still have enough fuel to
explore an additional celestial object -- perhaps a further billion
kilometres from Pluto.

The robotic spacecraft will be deep inside the Kuiper belt
by then, a mostly unexplored region of the solar system that
extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. As well as discovering variable stars and asteroids,
New Horizons will get up close and personal with a public-picked
object.

To find an icy body for New Horizons to hook up with, citizen science champ Zooniverse has got its mitts on deep
telescopic images for currently unknown objects in the Kuiper belt.
It needs space-obsessed individuals to pour over the images and
find potential destinations.

The images have already been filtered and altered to make
objects, asteroids, and variable stars stand out. By taking two
observations of the sky taken at two different times, and
subtracting them from each other, astronomers can remove most of
the light from constant sources like stars and
galaxies.

But you still end up with disorderly, static-plagued star maps that computers have trouble analysing. "When you're
looking for something special in masses of messy, real-world data,
sometimes there's no substitute for the human eye," says Southwest
Research Institute's John Spencer.

Users are asked to look at a small crop of the Kupier belt
and pick out small and white, well-defined blobs in a sea of static
and grain. By crowdsourcing a few thousand eyes and clicks, Nasa
should have a good idea of what objects will be in New Horizons'
flight path post-Pluto.

The probe will reach its destination by any date between
2016 and 2020, depending on the distance of the object chosen. If
it can be found, it will be the most distant object ever visited by
a spacecraft.